As standardization of a high-density rewritable optical disc, e.g., a Blu-ray disc rewritable (BD-RE), capable of storing high-quality video and audio is rapidly progressed, it is expected that related products will be developed, commercialized and supplied.
A conventional BD-RE single layer 100 is shown in FIG. 1. As shown in FIG. 1, there is a distance of approximately 0.1 mm between a recording layer and the surface of a transparent film being arranged between the recording layer and an objective lens (OL) 11 of an optical pick-up.
When an optical disc apparatus for reading and reproducing data recorded on the recording layer of the BD-RE single layer 100 or recording data thereon determines that a defect is detected on the layer 100 while performing a data recording operation, the optical disc apparatus records the data in an inner spare area (ISA) or outer spare area (OSA) separately assigned to a data area as shown in FIG. 2, in place of a data area.
Further, the optical disc apparatus generates a defect list (DFL) entry needed for identifying a cluster associated with a recording unit block (RUB) recorded in the spare area in place of a data area, and performs a recording and management operation for the generated DFL entry.
As shown in FIG. 2, management information associated with the spare areas and defects is contained and recorded in a field of rewritable disc definition structure (DDS) information of a lead-in area. The DDS information includes information items associated with the first physical sector number (PSN) of the DFL (P_DFL) a location of a logical sector number (LSN) 0 of a user data area, the last LSN of the user data area, a size of the ISA (ISA_size), a size of the OSA (OSA_size), spare area full flags indicating whether or not the respective spare areas are full, etc.
As described above, when the defect is detected in the data area while the optical disc apparatus records data in the data area, the optical disc apparatus searches for the spare area full flags contained and recorded in the DDS information field, selects the ISA or OSA in which the data can be recorded, and performs a sequence of data recording operations for recording the data in the selected spare area.
The recording layer of the BD-RE single layer 100 must be previously formatted so that the data can be recorded on the recording layer. The layer formatting method includes a general formatting method requiring a long formatting time, a recently proposed background formatting method, etc. Here, the background formatting method is that a formatting operation is performed automatically when or whenever the recording or reproducing device is idle, and stores information associated with the location of a formatted area until a time point when a data recording request is received from a user, thereby enabling the data, corresponding to the data recording request, to be recorded in the formatted area until the time point.
A high-density multi-layer optical disc, i.e., a BD-RE dual layer, capable of recording twice as much video and audio data as the BD-RE single layer, has been developed. As shown in FIG. 3, there is a distance d2 between the first recording layer (Layer 0) and the second recording layer (Layer 1) formed in the BD-RE dual layer 200. The first and second recording layers are formed at a location, within the BD-RE dual layer 200, having a bias toward the OL 11 of the optical pick-up.
The ISA and OSA are separately assigned to each of data areas associated with the first and second recording layers of the BD-RE dual layer 200. The first and second recording layers can be linked to each other so that large-capacity data can be recorded. However, there is not yet provided a method for effectively formatting the first and second recording layers provided in the BD-RE dual layer 200.